Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs. New versions of the firmware and software are periodically released to fix the bugs or to introduce new features, or both.
A generator in a manufacturing environment of an electronic device such as a mobile handset, or in other software development environments, generates update packages that are used to update the firmware of software components. These update packages are deposited into a repository. Unfortunately, several different generators may be generating different kinds of information. There is no easy way to populate these different kinds of update packages into a repository of some kind. More importantly, a repository within a distribution environment that can disseminate these update packages will have to deal with all the different formats in which the update packages are made available. In addition, other related information, such as metadata, that is often associated with update packages may be necessary for making decisions on the dissemination of update packages. However, such related information is often unavailable to the distribution environments. Special software is often written to retrieve such related information when necessary, from remote sources.
A telecom carrier or a wireless carrier may have a desire to support storing update packages received from several different sources, each source potentially employing various different formats for data to be transferred to the carrier network/wireless network. Providing security for such transfer of update packages from various sources is a problem. Supporting the plethora of security solutions is a management problem as well as a technical problem.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.